less can be more

less can be more

Am I excited to attend the Toronto International Film Festival next week? I think daunted is a more appropriate word… A local Toronto paper has asked me to pick the three fest films I am most looking forward to and I don’t know where to begin. As we reported in indieWIRE, there are 352 films screening in Toronto. On the other hand, I’ll be at the Telluride Film Festival this weekend where maybe two dozen new features will screen and tonight in indieWIRE we published a story about the upcoming Hamptons International Film Festival, they will be cutting back on the number of features this year, emphasizing that they want the event to be more highly curated.

Overwhelmed by large, catch-all festivals that offer hundreds of films, I’d argue that the move towards fests becoming more carefully curated is a welcome one. In fairness, Toronto seems to excel at offering a solid roster of films in a number of distinctive sections, but it can be quite tough for other fests to match that level of consistent quality… Either way, its still daunting…